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Welcome to Fairfax Underground, a project site designed to improve communication among residents of Fairfax County, VA. Feel free to post anything Northern Virginia residents would find interesting.
Obama can be a war president in his second term ...
Posted by:
Sabatasso's Pizza
()
Date: September 16, 2014 10:50AM
because both houses will be Republican and that's the only thing he can get done.
Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, U.Va. Center for Politics September 11th, 2014
For several months, we’ve held steady on our range of expected gains for Republicans in the Senate: a net of four to eight seats. With Labor Day in the rearview mirror and with less than 55 days to go until the midterms, we’re giving Republicans a slight bump: Our new range is a Republican net of five to eight Senate seats.
This means that the best-case scenario we can now envision for Democrats is a 50-50 tie in the Senate, with Vice President Joe Biden’s tiebreaking vote narrowly keeping Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) as majority leader.
The likeliest outcome remains a Republican gain of six or seven seats, which we noted before Labor Day and stand by now. That would be good for a narrow 51-49 or 52-48 Republican Senate majority.
What’s changed? Not a whole lot: It’s just that the weight of an unpopular president in the White House and a GOP-leaning Senate map is subtly moving things a tick or two in the Republican direction.
We do have one major rating change this week: Arkansas is going from Toss-up to Leans Republican. We had Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) as an underdog earlier this cycle, and we’re putting him back there now based on the growing weight of polling data. If one assumes Republicans will net Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia, they need at least two more seats to meet the low end of our range. Arkansas looks like the next domino to fall, and if that comes to pass, the GOP will have netted four seats. (More on this in our race-by-race analysis below.) Given the wide range of other targets for Republicans in the Senate — Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, and North Carolina, with other conceivable but more remote possibilities in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire — it seems reasonable to expect that the GOP will net at least one more assuming they don’t lose any of their current seats. Hence the new range.
Given that Republicans are poised, we believe, for substantial Senate gains, we’re wondering: What would count as a “wave” for the GOP in the Senate?
As emeritus Prof. Al Tuchfarber of the University of Cincinnati wrote in the Crystal Ball last week, waves have a “very specific semi-formal definition” from a political science standpoint, which is that one party or the other nets 20 or more seats in the House. By that definition, the GOP is likely to fall short this year, if only because they are close to being maxed out in the House. (We project the Republicans to gain five to eight House seats, coincidentally identical to the new Senate projection.)
But there’s no wave definition for the Senate, probably because the Senate is so idiosyncratic: Only a third of the seats are up every two years, and each class alternates between being contested in bigger-turnout presidential years and smaller-turnout midterm years.
Jacob Smith, a political science graduate student at the University of North Carolina, has an interesting take on this. In his senior honors thesis for Kenyon College, he researched the idea of a wave election and came up with this definition: A wave year is “a congressional election that produces the potential for a political party to significantly affect the political status quo as the result of a substantial increase in seats for that party.” (We encourage readers to read his deeper explanation.)
By his calculation, Smith argues that a six-seat gain for the GOP in the Senate (likelier than not, and Smith freely admits that defining waves in a standard way in the Senate is quite challenging) and a 26-seat gain in the House (not very likely) would make 2014 a wave year. Previous wave years by this definition since World War II are: 1946, 1948, 1958, 1964, 1966, 1974, 1980, 1994, 2006, and 2010.
Crystall ball
Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, U.Va. Center for Politics September 11th, 2014
For several months, we’ve held steady on our range of expected gains for Republicans in the Senate: a net of four to eight seats. With Labor Day in the rearview mirror and with less than 55 days to go until the midterms, we’re giving Republicans a slight bump: Our new range is a Republican net of five to eight Senate seats.
This means that the best-case scenario we can now envision for Democrats is a 50-50 tie in the Senate, with Vice President Joe Biden’s tiebreaking vote narrowly keeping Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) as majority leader.
The likeliest outcome remains a Republican gain of six or seven seats, which we noted before Labor Day and stand by now. That would be good for a narrow 51-49 or 52-48 Republican Senate majority.
What’s changed? Not a whole lot: It’s just that the weight of an unpopular president in the White House and a GOP-leaning Senate map is subtly moving things a tick or two in the Republican direction.
We do have one major rating change this week: Arkansas is going from Toss-up to Leans Republican. We had Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) as an underdog earlier this cycle, and we’re putting him back there now based on the growing weight of polling data. If one assumes Republicans will net Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia, they need at least two more seats to meet the low end of our range. Arkansas looks like the next domino to fall, and if that comes to pass, the GOP will have netted four seats. (More on this in our race-by-race analysis below.) Given the wide range of other targets for Republicans in the Senate — Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, and North Carolina, with other conceivable but more remote possibilities in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire — it seems reasonable to expect that the GOP will net at least one more assuming they don’t lose any of their current seats. Hence the new range.
Given that Republicans are poised, we believe, for substantial Senate gains, we’re wondering: What would count as a “wave” for the GOP in the Senate?
As emeritus Prof. Al Tuchfarber of the University of Cincinnati wrote in the Crystal Ball last week, waves have a “very specific semi-formal definition” from a political science standpoint, which is that one party or the other nets 20 or more seats in the House. By that definition, the GOP is likely to fall short this year, if only because they are close to being maxed out in the House. (We project the Republicans to gain five to eight House seats, coincidentally identical to the new Senate projection.)
But there’s no wave definition for the Senate, probably because the Senate is so idiosyncratic: Only a third of the seats are up every two years, and each class alternates between being contested in bigger-turnout presidential years and smaller-turnout midterm years.
Jacob Smith, a political science graduate student at the University of North Carolina, has an interesting take on this. In his senior honors thesis for Kenyon College, he researched the idea of a wave election and came up with this definition: A wave year is “a congressional election that produces the potential for a political party to significantly affect the political status quo as the result of a substantial increase in seats for that party.” (We encourage readers to read his deeper explanation.)
By his calculation, Smith argues that a six-seat gain for the GOP in the Senate (likelier than not, and Smith freely admits that defining waves in a standard way in the Senate is quite challenging) and a 26-seat gain in the House (not very likely) would make 2014 a wave year. Previous wave years by this definition since World War II are: 1946, 1948, 1958, 1964, 1966, 1974, 1980, 1994, 2006, and 2010.
Crystall ball